Integrating large language models and active inference to understand eye movements in reading and dyslexia.

We present a novel computational model employing hierarchical active inference to simulate reading and eye movements. The model characterizes linguistic processing as inference over a hierarchical generative model, facilitating predictions and inferences at various levels of granularity, from syllables to sentences. Our approach combines the strengths of large language models for realistic textual predictions and active inference for guiding eye movements to informative textual information, enabling the testing of predictions.

The Inner Road to Happiness: A Narrative Review Exploring the Interoceptive Benefits of Exercise for Well-Being.

Background: Interoception, the multifaceted perception of internal bodily signals, is crucial for homeostasis, emotional regulation, and overall well-being. Physical exercise significantly influences interoceptive mechanisms through its varied physiological, neurobiological, and psychological impacts. Despite its potential to enhance this internal sensing across its dimensions and foster adaptive behaviors like self-regulation, exercise remains an underutilized therapeutic approach.

Problem difficulty and expertise modulate planning performance in a virtual embodied task.

Expertise in cognitively and motorically demanding tasks, such as indoor climbing and bouldering, is often associated with enhanced planning abilities, yet the specific relationship between cognitive and motor planning in such tasks remains underexplored. This study investigates how expertise influences route planning in bouldering, with a focus on the impact of problem difficulty. We asked expert and novice climbers to virtually solve easy and hard bouldering problems on a familiar indoor climbing wall, using a custom app that allowed them to plan and select sequences of hand movements.

Is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu a Traumatic Sport? Survey on Italian Athletes' Rehabilitation and Return to Sport.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is a physically demanding sport associated with a notable risk of musculoskeletal injuries. Understanding injury patterns, rehabilitation approaches, and psychological readiness to return to sport (RTS) is essential for prevention and management strategies. This study aimed to investigate injury characteristics among Italian BJJ athletes, assess their rehabilitation processes and psychological recovery, and identify key risk factors such as belt level, body mass index (BMI), and training load.

Whole genome sequencing analysis in primary lateral sclerosis (PLS) patients reveals mutations in neurological diseases-causing genes.

Background: Primary Lateral Sclerosis (PLS) is a rare, adult-onset neurodegenerative disease that predominantly affects upper motor neurons. Despite being considered mostly sporadic, familial cases and rare genetic variants in genes associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, hereditary spastic paraplegia and other neurological disorders have been reported in some PLS cases. Due to its rare prevalence among general population, large genetic studies of PLS are lacking.

Eye and hand coarticulation during problem solving reveals hierarchically organized planning.

During everyday activities -such as preparing a cup of coffee or traveling across cities -we often plan ahead and execute sequences of actions. Yet, how such planning unfolds when solutions must be formed from scratch, without external cues or routines, remains unclear. This study examines how participants coordinate gaze and cursor movements while solving path-tracing problems on a grid with multiple targets.

A plasma proteomics-based candidate biomarker panel predictive of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Identifying a reliable biomarker for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is crucial for clinical practice. Here, in this cross-sectional study, we used the Olink Explore 3072 platform to investigate plasma proteomics as a biomarker tool for this neurodegenerative condition. Thirty-three proteins were differentially abundant in the plasma of patients with ALS (n = 183) versus controls (n = 309).

Automated planning and scheduling in robot-aided rehabilitation: a review.

Robotic systems are increasingly utilized in rehabilitation contexts, offering tailored support for physical and cognitive functions. Enabling these systems to autonomously personalize treatments entails a critical role for automated planning and scheduling methodologies. However, a comprehensive review to map the control architectures of robotic rehabilitation systems that leverage automated planning for long-term customization is lacking, addressing a key gap in the literature.

Impact of pacifier use and parenting characteristics on toddlers' vocabulary development.

Introduction: This study investigated the relationship between pacifier use and early vocabulary development, specifically hypothesizing that pacifier use would correlate with a reduced overall vocabulary size and a specific underrepresentation of abstract words.

Methods: We recruited a sample of 98 typically developing children aged 18-36 months. Data collection included information on pacifier use, feeding habits, parenting styles, parental satisfaction, and vocabulary.

Structuring the environment nudges participants toward hierarchical over shortest path planning.

Effective planning is crucial for navigating complex environments and achieving goals efficiently. In this study, we investigated how environmental structure influences the selection of planning strategies. Forty-two participants navigated a space station to collect colored spheres, with environments either structured (spheres grouped by color) or unstructured (spheres scattered randomly).

Water Is and Is Not HO, Depending on Who You Ask: Conceptualizations of Water Vary Across Chemists and Laypeople.

Conceptual representations can be shaped by multiple factors, including expertise. In this study, we tested whether the concept of water is represented differently across laypeople and chemists, focusing on psychological essentialism. Essentialized categories are thought to be determined by internal factors (e.

Closing the box.

We were grateful for the level of engagement and insight from the commentaries on our discussion article, and for the opportunity to pick up on some of the common themes in what follows. Several commentaries focused upon the degeneracy in the relationship in how an internal model - of the sort that might be used either by an AI system or by our brains - might be formulated and the way in which this degeneracy might be resolved. Further themes were the role of model width as opposed to depth, the phenomenology of non-Markovian time, and a useful reminder that linguistic communication is necessarily a multi-agent, collective, endeavor.

Augmenting art crossmodally: possibilities and pitfalls.

In this narrative historical review, we take a closer look at the question of whether it is possible to augment works of art through crossmodal (specifically audiovisual) means. We start by highlighting an important distinction between three classes of audiovisual crossmodal correspondence: Namely those operating on individual sensory stimuli (so-called basic correspondences), those operating on dynamically-changing stimuli, or else on combinations of unisensory stimuli (so-called mid-level correspondences), and those operating on complex and often aesthetically-meaningful stimuli, such as music and paintings. We also highlight another important distinction between the literature on crossmodal matching and that dedicated to demonstrating crossmodal effects.

The medial fronto-parietal network of the macaque: Different specializations for spatial parameters of reaching?

Neuronal populations in parietal and frontal cortices orchestrate a series of visuomotor transformations crucial for executing successful reaching movements. Two key nodes in this network are the dorsal premotor area F2 and the medial posterior parietal area V6A, which are strongly reciprocally connected (Gamberini et al., 2021).

Exploring the phenotypic fingerprints of ANXA11 variants in ALS: a population-based study in an European cohort.

Background: Annexin A11 (ANXA11) has emerged as a significant gene associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and cognitive impairments. This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence and clinical and cognitive features of pathogenic variants in ANXA11 in an Italian ALS cohort.

Methods: Data were collected from the Piemonte and Valle d'Aosta Register for ALS between 2009 and 2020.

Higher-order Sonification of the Human Brain.

Sonification, the process of translating data into sound, has recently gained traction as a tool for both disseminating scientific findings and enabling visually impaired individuals to analyze data. Despite its potential, most current sonification methods remain limited to one-dimensional data, primarily due to the absence of practical, quantitative, and robust techniques for handling multi-dimensional datasets. We analyze structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of the human brain by integrating two- and three-point statistical measures in Fourier space: the power spectrum and bispectrum.

The Signalled Licking/Avoidance of Punishment (SLAP) Paradigm in Rats: Capacity for Insight Between Goal Conditioning and Signalling Contingencies.

In developmental-age kids with specific-learning-disabilities (SLD), functional illiteracy entails poor logical reasoning; in those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a deficit in prospective memory results in difficulty executing previously planned actions. We model this SLD and/or ADHD construct in the rat via the signalled-licking/avoidance-of-punishment protocol (SLAP): We aim to study to assess rats' ability to merge two independently learned notions (one Pavlovian and one instrumental) and their deliberate exploitation. Rats were tested in Skinner boxes with a water-dispenser and lickometer.

Empirical exploration of the 4P theory of creativity using virtual reality.

In the 4P theory of creativity, Rhodes in 1961 emphasises the importance of different components in human creativity, which arises from the dynamic interplay of four key components: Person, Process, Product, and Press. Following previous studies that focused on relations among the 4P components, we conducted an exploratory empirical study with a sample of 60 participants using virtual reality. In our study we investigated: Person through self-report questionnaires on participants' personality and creativity traits; Process through the registrations of users' interactions during a VR task in which they create artworks; Product through a semi-automated ontological analysis of the artworks' features; Press by altering the virtual environment with contextual auditory stimuli.

Roadmap for animate matter.

Humanity has long sought inspiration from nature to innovate materials and devices. As science advances, nature-inspired materials are becoming part of our lives. Animate materials, characterized by their activity, adaptability, and autonomy, emulate properties of living systems.

Deep Hybrid Models: Infer and Plan in a Dynamic World.

To determine an optimal plan for complex tasks, one often deals with dynamic and hierarchical relationships between several entities. Traditionally, such problems are tackled with optimal control, which relies on the optimization of cost functions; instead, a recent biologically motivated proposal casts planning and control as an inference process. assumes that action and perception are two complementary aspects of life whereby the role of the former is to fulfill the predictions inferred by the latter.

Embodied decisions as active inference.

Decision-making is often conceptualized as a serial process, during which sensory evidence is accumulated for the choice alternatives until a certain threshold is reached, at which point a decision is made and an action is executed. This decide-then-act perspective has successfully explained various facets of perceptual and economic decisions in the laboratory, in which action dynamics are usually irrelevant to the choice. However, living organisms often face another class of decisions-called embodied decisions-that require selecting between potential courses of actions to be executed timely in a dynamic environment, e.

Human-AI collectives most accurately diagnose clinical vignettes.

AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), are increasingly being employed in high-stakes decisions that impact both individuals and society at large, often without adequate safeguards to ensure safety, quality, and equity. Yet LLMs hallucinate, lack common sense, and are biased-shortcomings that may reflect LLMs' inherent limitations and thus may not be remedied by more sophisticated architectures, more data, or more human feedback. Relying solely on LLMs for complex, high-stakes decisions is therefore problematic.

Embodied decision making in athletes and other animals.

Humans and other animals continuously make embodied decisions about ongoing or pending courses of action. Examples of embodied decisions include a hunting lioness's decision of which gazelle to chase and a soccer player's decision of which teammate to pass the ball to. The study of embodied decisions has recently gained tractions across several fields, including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and sports science.